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Weddings can be expensive. The average cost of a wedding in the US is around $30,000. Where does all that money go? A short list of possible expenses: Hair, nails, make-up, wedding gown, bridesmaid’s dresses, back-up dresses, groom’s tux, groomsmen’s tuxes, back-up tuxes, children’s formal wear, that little pillow-thing for the ring, bouquets, flower petals, table centerpiece floral arrangements, decorations, ‘event space’ reservations, hotel reservations, restaurant reservations, invitations, calligrapher for the invitations, entertainment, the bachelor and bachelorette parties, commemorative t-shirts for the bachelor and bachelorette parties, thousands of disposable cameras, film development for thousands of partially-shot rolls of film, an actual photographer, a sound system, a DJ, booze, advil, sleeping pills, a good shrink, church service fees, rice or glitter or whatever, catering, the cake, the back-up cake, horses for the carriage, driver for the carriage, food for the horses, food for the driver, something old, something borrowed -- where the hell do you buy something borrowed?!, something new, a good wedding planner at the last minute because it was a mistake trying to plan your own wedding -- you’re biting your nails, your mascara is running, you’re tearing your hair out. There basically isn’t an upper-limit. The world’s most expensive wedding to date was Prince Charles’ and Lady Diana’s on July 29, 1981. When you adjust the bill for inflation, they spent $110 million in 2014 dollars. But weddings can also be cheap, at least in theory. You can apply for a marriage license in the state of California for between $35 and $100. That’s as low as $17.50 a person! Invite your parents and they might chip in, too, or at the very least buy you lunch. But the question is, are expensive weddings “worth it”? Does a big expensive wedding correlate to a successful marriage? Some researchers at Emory University probed at this question in: 'A Diamond is Forever' and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration, and their answer is “probably not.” Money Can’t Buy Happiness Emory’s researchers surveyed thousands of people who had "ever been married to someone of the opposite sex and were not widowed" about (a) their marriages and weddings, and (b) a load of other things to control for: "Specifically, we gathered information on marital status, marriage duration, children, length of time dated, feelings and attitudes at the time of wedding proposal, honeymoon, engagement ring expenses, wedding attendance, total wedding expenses, age, age at marriage, gender, race/ethnicity, education, employment, household income, region of residence, religious attendance, and differences in age, race, and education between respondent and partner." Then, they constructed a proportional hazards model to analyze the data. A proportional hazards model relates the time that passes before an event occurs (bridge collapse, death, stroke) to variables that might be associated (using a particular material in building the bridge, smoking in your twenties, taking a particular medicine). The model returns a multiplier that each variable adds individually to the probability of that event: “For example, taking a drug may halve one's hazard rate for a stroke occurring, or, changing the material from which a manufactured component is constructed may double its hazard rate for failure.” So what does an expensive wedding do to your hazard rate for divorce?